John Carter Fail

Tuesday, March 20th, 2012

What is it about the name “Carter”? Regretfully, the title of this post is intended to refer to a new magnitude of fail. Disclaimer: I still have high hopes for this movie, have not gotten around to seeing it, want to.

The film, directed by Andrew Stanton of the Pixar animation house, opened poorly in the US two weekends ago with just $30m, and has so far made $184m across the globe. It has been far more successful outside the US, with No 1 openings in Russia and the UK helping to save it from an even more humiliating total.
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Critics have suggested that John Carter’s failure to connect with audiences may have been due to confusing marketing as well as lukewarm reviews. Disney chose not to run with the “of Mars” suffix in the wake of traditionally poor box-office results for films that focus on the planet, and trailers also largely ignored the movie’s central romance, something Hollywood tends to see as a surefire method of attracting female filmgoers.

“The movie is called John Carter, but aside from the fact that he can jump far and looks good without a shirt on, what else did commercials really convey about the title character?” wrote Ray Subers of the Box Office Mojo website. “Also, what was John Carter doing in this desert landscape occupied by tall green men, aside from fighting giant furry white creatures?”

What is fascinating, to me, is that these “marketing” people have spent their lives — I assume — honing their craft, learning how to connect with the public. To be sure, they succeed in a big way when they do succeed. But they’re not in the business of amplitude, what they’re supposed to deliver is frequency, and they don’t seem to be connecting that often.

Their industry is a fail. They’ve become overly-institutionalized, more worried about following rules of orthodoxy than about crossing the finish line.

And their fail, is ours. I see it everywhere now, in politics as well as outside of politics. People are supposed to convince me of something: Citizen Kane is the greatest movie ever made, this-or-that kid has Autism, the earth is getting warmer and humans are the cause, there’s way too much sexism in M&M candies, Mitt Romney is inevitable, Barack Obama’s birth certificate is genuine and Rush Limbaugh shouldn’t have called a slut a slut. Over and over again, we end up back at the same place: There’s no argument presented on which I can pass judgment. I’d like to say, I have doubts about my abilities to hear unwelcome ideas and to evaluate them with balance, fairness and objectivity. The reality is, we don’t make it to that point.

It says something bad about us, as a society, that the problem persists in everything from sexist candies, to mega-film-flops with shirtless guys, to talk radio hosts and sluts. We’ve lost something. As a resident of the culture, I view this with some measure of alarm. I perceive it thusly:

My job is to convince you of A. Step one: Figure out if you already think A. If not, fuck you and I’m outta here. There! Job done!

Isn’t that exactly what happened with all of the above examples. Here’s a marketing budget, now use it to convince people they should go see John Carter. Okay…here’s some footage. Look how high he can jump. Here he is facing off against a big monster. He’s got a gorgeous bod, ladies, and…oh, look at that! He just beaned the monster with a big rock. See our movie!

If, then, the Courts are to regard the Constitution, and the Constitution is superior to any ordinary act of the Legislature, the Constitution, and not such ordinary act, must govern the case to which they both apply.

Those, then, who controvert the principle that the Constitution is to be considered in court as a paramount law are reduced to the necessity of maintaining that courts must close their eyes on the Constitution, and see only the law.

This doctrine would subvert the very foundation of all written Constitutions. It would declare that an act which, according to the principles and theory of our government, is entirely void, is yet, in practice, completely obligatory. It would declare that, if the Legislature shall do what is expressly forbidden, such act, notwithstanding the express prohibition, is in reality effectual. It would be giving to the Legislature a practical and real omnipotence with the same breath which professes to restrict their powers within narrow limits. It is prescribing limits, and declaring that those limits may be passed at pleasure.

See what Chief Justice Marshall did there? This is what seems to have died off; he got into the opposing argument. Gave it a test drive. “This doctrine would subvert the very foundation of all written Constitutions…It is prescribing limits, and declaring that those limits may be passed at pleasure.” He declared the opposing argument to be just so much nonsense — not because it was his intention at the outset to do so, which it very well may have been, and probably was. But after giving it a try, and rationally weighing the consequences of following it, he declared this knowledgeably. Can’t take this car on the freeway. None of the gears above second are working, and the engine won’t go that fast. It’s the kind of finding that works best as an actual finding, not as conjecture. John Marshall embraced the experience. We don’t.

It seems we can’t think through ideas hostile to us, or against which we have pledged some hostility in return. Part of this obligatory hostility is that we have to hold the idea at arms-length, and get it dismissed before it’s had a chance to contaminate us. We’ve intellectually lost the idea to do much beyond declaring them welcome or unwelcome. This is injurious to our ability to hold aloft the welcome ideas, and state authoritatively why they are welcome. We select them with all the respectability and gravity of a flipped coin.

People like to bitch up a storm about movies having lost all their creativity, about a Hollywood overly enamored with remakes and sequels and “homages.” I don’t think the problem has to do with what can & cannot be cooked up; it’s got to do with what can & can’t be marketed. If the loyal following is not already built up and ready to miss important surgery appointments to buy the tickets, then the marketing project won’t be capable of building it.

Because we don’t communicate with each other in such a way for that kind of marketing to work anymore. I fear that all we have to say to each other, distilled down into its essentials, is: “agree with me already or else screw you.”

Maybe I’m reading way too much into it. I hope so. I’ve seen some bits of evidence to suggest so. But not much in the last, oh, five to ten years.

I’d bet a good amount that the phenomenon you describe so eloquently tracks pretty closely with the ever-more-precipitous decline of higher education. I don’t care so much about grade school — though lord almighty, does that suck too — because it’s about stuffing facts into heads. College is where we’re supposed to learn the nuts-and-bolts of true critical thinking, but how can that happen when every single program in the liberal arts — the ones that are supposed to both teach us our traditions, and how to evaluate them critically — is nothing but question-begging?

“Critical Race Theory,” so beloved of Glorious Leader, is just one of the more egregious examples. When you simply take as given that “white privilege” determines the shape of our legal system (and the concurrent assumption that “white privilege” inexorably leads to overt racism), what’s there to be “critical” about? You can boil every question on the midterm down to: “White people are evil. Discuss.”

Same goes for African-American Studies, Wymyn’s Studies, This-, That-, or The Other Studies. And history. And English. When the baseline for discussion is not “What does Jane Austen show us about the human condition?” but “How do Jane Austen’s novels embody the inherent inequalities in the British class system?,” what the hell is there to think about? You’re not analyzing a piece of literature, you’re just rejiggering gripes selected off a very small menu.

It’s worse than that, actually, because “a college education” is now assumed to be no more than a knack for shuffling victim cards. Grab any kid coming out of a general American history course (assuming you can find one; lots of colleges don’t even teach these anymore) and ask him about the Constitution. He won’t know a blessed thing that’s actually IN the document — perish the thought they’d ever be assigned to read it — but his eyes can glaze over as he recites mechanically “three-fifths clause, enshrined the privileges of the colonial merchant class, inherent inequalities of capitalism, blah blah blah.” Oooooh, isn’t it wonderful, all these newfangled ideas Johnny’s been exposed to?

I believe that “box-office receipts” refers to the gross take from ticket sales. That take has to be split with theater owners and also takes a hit from overhead. In there are the expenses of “marketing” which, I believe, come in after the amount budgeted to actually make the film.

Ahh yes, La Wik sez… “On average, the movie’s distributor receives more than half of the revenue, with the remainder kept by the movie theater. The split varies from movie to movie, and the percentage for the distributor is generally higher in early weeks. Usually the distributor gets a percentage of the revenue after first deducting a “house allowance” or “house nut”. It is also common that the distributor gets either a percentage of the gross revenue, or a higher percentage of the revenue after deducting the nut, whichever is larger.”

For the record, I saw the movie last Friday, wanting to check it out on the big screen. I have some minor quibbles about film adaptations of books in general, but I will say that the movie stays fairly faithful to the spirit of the series pretty well.

Yeah, the marketing snafu was an epic fail. I still think that if they had marketed the movie as, um, it actually is, it would have done better.

If you say Mars, women won’t come. If you say Princess, men won’t come. Instead we’ll say “John Carter” and on one will come. Brilliant!

That kind of brilliance we can do without. My guess is that some of those smart guys now work in the current administration in DC.

I like Citizen Kane; it’s one of my favorite films. After watching you slam it here and on FB, it seems to me like you couldn’t reach your political button to turn it off and just enjoy good film making. Instead, you chose to see it as a tribal liberal vs. Conservative screed that slammed capitalism. You might want to watch it again after a couple of beers. Lighten up, Francis!

I have no idea regarding Buffett. However, I’m not aware of anyone politicizing Citizen Kane but you, and that’s my point: you chose to bring politics into that discussion. It’s just a well crafted movie–nothing more.

And for the record, Kane was an amalgam of at least four characters, so it wasn’t really a biopic of any one individual. Of the four, Hearst is the most well known, so comparisons are more often made to him, but quite a bit of that character also came from Samuel Insull, Harold Fowler McCormick and Orson Welles himself.

You’re asking people to prove a subjective statement like “I consider Citizen Kane to be the greatest film of all time” as if it were an objective statement. You know full well it’s not, but are capitalizing on the fact that critics often speak as the final authority when issuing their opinions, because they must maintain a proletariat belief in their views to keep people reading them.

You, for example, think “The Fall Guy” was a great show, but think “Magnum P.I.” is a chick show. Only one of those have you actually watched enough to know, but I know better than to waste time making a case against your opinions in that regard, because they’re simply subjective (I’ve actually watched both shows in bulk.)

If you feel “Citizen Kane” is overrated, so be it. But it’s just a feeling. Just like those of us who like it, also must concede it’s not completely born out of objectivity–although there are technical aspects of that movie that are revered objectively. You have also credited the technical particulars, if I’m not mistaken.

Right. I have the feeling, that they have the feeling, that it’s the “best movie ever” just because they lean left politically. And if you follow the threads over at Hello Kitty, you’ll see I came to that conclusion as a last resort, after making a point of ordering the disc and watching it repeatedly, and then asking for some specifics which I never got. Yes I got specifics on what parts of the film are good. But that wasn’t my question. I want to know why it should be #1.

Here’s a tell: People who take the (admittedly subjective) view that CK is overrated, call out specific rivals. “How can you possibly say it’s more of a technological wonder than Wizard of Oz,” etc. How can you say it’s better than The Godfather. How can you say it’s more culturally important or better story-telling than Raiders of the Lost Ark.

People who say CK truly deserves the top spot, don’t do this. They genuflect. They’ll wax lyrically about something cool that Welles did, like fading from Susan’s face to the stained glass…but they don’t go on to say “There! Now, that beats anything Quentin Tarantino did!” So they end up posturing like they’ve gone through some rational process, at the conclusion of which they were forced to conclude CK is the greatest film ever…when, in reality, they just figured that out at the outset and then followed a bunch of motions. Just like liberals.

Also, if you read up on the history of the film, it was only a few critics who thought it was wonderful when it came out, and that really was because of pent-up rage and frustration against Hearst. It wasn’t until Hearst was cold and dead in the ground, some ten years later, that this cultural movement started to think back on CK as some kind of overlooked masterpiece. And you know, I’ll even go along with that much, I’d call it a “masterpiece” of sorts. I just think the greatest-ever thing is contrived, that’s all. And…well, in the middle, it’s a little slow.

Looking forward to commenting as knowledgeably about JC. I’ve heard through the grapevine some generally positive things, like Physics Geek’s comment. This is looking like all or most of the “fail” is in the marketing.

Nah, you’ve put yourself up as the arbiter of what is the BESTEST film of all time, so any point someone makes as a case for CK, you simply won’t accept. You’re saying:

“Convince me CK was all that and a bag of chips. What? No, I don’t accept that. Therefore, you must think CK is great because you’re a liberal.” That’s the extent of the conversation.

By the way, Mozart also wasn’t considered the greatest in his day. But he wasn’t pronounced greater 50 years later because Salieri or Leopold had died, so people could release their pent up feelings and go, “Oh wait, yeah, I guess Wolfgang was pretty good after all.”

History is rife with art that wasn’t fully appreciated in its own time, subject matter notwithstanding.

“Convince me CK was all that and a bag of chips. What? No, I don’t accept that. Therefore, you must think CK is great because you’re a liberal.” That’s the extent of the conversation.

Now you’re reaching. That conversation didn’t take place at all. I said, tell me why it’s Teh Greatest and give me some specifics…and I was told I just need to go read this thing over here, and/or to watch it again. It’s a classic left-wing move: Oh, no, I won’t just do the sensible thing and give you the reason, right here, that would be like sacrilege or something, like speaking the name of a deity. Instead, IfYouJustGoToThisWebsite everything will be clear to you.

When it always goes that way, no exceptions…one is allowed to come to a logical conclusion.

It’s called paraphrasing, and that’s the gist of it. And again, you’re deliberately pretending that a subjective statement is an objective statement so you can have grounds for disagreement.

The people who are guilty of the kind of debate you’re referencing are probably not doing it because YOU see a stealth liberal message in the film. The reality is that they’ve been told CK is the greatest film of all time by people smarter than them. You can watch the movie and see that cinematically it has merit. So these individuals feel they’re on safe ground pronouncing it as the greatest movie ever (like so many other critics.) It’s a “me too” thing, and a “don’t you think I’m smart” ’cause I say things that the critics say” affectation. They don’t really know, so they can’t defend the position.

I’ve never personally pronounced CK to be the best movie. It’s in my top five. But that’s MY top five, not an empirical, this is the greatest piece of work ever–I have no idea what is, or how we would decide. I can see why people trumpet CK’s technical merits, and I see many truths in the plot. But otherwise, I have no dog in the fight, other than this notion that it’s a liberal film, which is nonsense.

In fact, the first time I saw CK, I chuckled thinking, “Yep, those who are on a crusade to change the world are the darkest, most power hungry, and usually fuck things up.” That’s because they perceive perfection in relation to controlling others.

Sure enough, that’s what the film is about. Sounds like a Conservative-like warning to activists to look within themselves and solve their own issues, as the change the world needs. Sort of like how the people who go on and on about peace, love, and harmony are always the most conflicted on the inside, lose their cool first in social situations, and are obviously “spiritually” hedging with their rhetoric.

To me, CK is a “physician heal thyself” message. What Welles intended in this regard is murky, but that’s what I pull from it. I think you might have missed that in your viewings.

The people who are guilty of the kind of debate you’re referencing are probably not doing it because YOU see a stealth liberal message in the film. The reality is that they’ve been told CK is the greatest film of all time by people smarter than them….It’s a “me too” thing, and a “don’t you think I’m smart” ’cause I say things that the critics say” affectation. They don’t really know, so they can’t defend the position.

Then we have no quibble.

I did suspect as much, but didn’t want to settle on that until I’d done some research. That’s the right thing to do, isn’t it?

For the record, I was surprised about this; Mr. Esmay is someone who is known to me, whether I agree with him about things or not, as someone who does not gather his knowledge that way. Say what you want, he does seem to think for himself. That’s probably why I got that conversation going & decided to order the disc (again) in the first place. I thought I was going to get some sturdy explanation about this “best film ever made” thing.

What the CK fans seem to be missing here, is that there is a lot of creative thinking going on in cinema, especially if you go back to the old stuff. I’m not talking about as a percentage, mind you. There are troubles there. But cumulatively, over a hundred years or more, there has been enough thinking outside the box that I don’t think you can crown a movie as best-ever-done just because it’s got some.

Well, heh…if that‘s what’s been going on here, a bunch of stupid people parroting each other while the smarter people stay silent, out of respect for some “stupid people have enough problems” rule…I’ll have to count myself among the stupid ones. It’s only fair, I’ve been listening to this “CK greatest evar” thing for years and years, seems like Pauline Kael got it started in our modern age…never did understand what was going on.

I see, once again, the first step toward acquiring knowledge is admitting you don’t have it. But I’ve spent enough time on Kane, I’m much more curious about Carter. And Dejah Thoris’ boobs.

I think a lot of it is a knowledge problem, or maybe just a vocabulary problem. Not only do I not know enough about movies to have an informed opinion on Citizen Kane (though I did watch it once back in the days), I wouldn’t be able to construct an argument about it even if I cared passionately. Any specifics I try to give you come off sounding like this: “there’s that one shot where the camera kinda comes in through the skylight and then sorta dissolves….”

If there’s a political upshot to all this, I think it’s there. Used to be that old-timey Progressives had all sorts of intellectual ammo to deploy — their arguments were based on a faulty understanding of human nature, but at least they could justify them, starting with Rousseau or whoever and working up from there. This led to all sorts of angels-on-pinheads wonkery — whole forests were decimated on abstruse points of Marxist theory — but at least your average leftist was accustomed to arguing from an installed base of knowledge.

These days, though, conservatives have all the knowledge on their side. Not because they’re such able scholars or deep thinkers — I refer you to the profound cogitations of Meghan McCain — but because basic math and recent history aren’t secrets. It’s pretty easy to point to this chart — this one, right over here — that shows the US economy going kerflooey sometime in 2019. It’s even easier to point to Russia, the National Health Service, and every Third World shithole where Marxism has ever been tried, and say, “Q.E.D.”

All liberals have is some whines about “fairness,” and when you ask them who the hell said life is fair, they call you a racist. That, and a smug sense of superiority, is all they’ve got.

Which is, I think (to return to the arts for a sec), the reason they have this tendency to insist that movies, songs, books, etc. that cater to their point of view are not only entertaining, but objectively good art. They don’t have Hegel, Marx, and Lenin to back them up anymore, but Tim Robbins and Sean Penn sure can serve up the old-time religion on the big screen. These are the only “authorities” they can appeal to…. and it often works, because hey, who’s read Hegel lately? If we can keep the discussion on whether or not Such-and-Such is a good movie or So-and-So a great singer, we keep the discussion off the message these movies, songs, etc. are trying to convey — i.e. the same tired, boring, provably wrong socialistic claptrap as every other good movie, great band, “important” novel, etc.

I just don’t think it’s the best film ever, and I’m left scrambling when I try to understand why anyone else would say that.

Okay, I’m gonna buck the tide hear and say that I think Citizen Kane deserves the billing that it gets. Having said that, let me make a few points:

I took History of Motion Pictures II (part I was silent movies) in college and saw lots of movies that were the first to do certain things with the camera, lighting, sets, etcetera. They are, almost without exception, tediously boring movies. I will make an exception for Shoot the Piano Player because I happen to like Truffaut. CK was also, if not the first to do some things with the camera and lighting, the first to do so well, in ways that impacted the story. If not for CK and the horrifically boring movies I watched in class (BTW, I find Citizen Kane to be somewhat boring in its own right), we -potentially- wouldn’t have many of the things that we take for granted in movies today. On a tangentially related note, CK would be awful colorized as much of its specialness is due to shadows that show up only in B&W.

Actually, I did enjoy seeing Brazil and Kaspar Hauser, but that plus Truffaut was about it. When the lights went out, so did- sometimes- my consciousness.

The story about a good man gone bad seems weak, to me. I think James’ (sanskara) admiration falls very heavily into #2, and #1 as well. He’s heavy into the b&w photography and has managed to put together some impressive work here. His lament about the “stupid people” thinking what they’re told to think, I believe, has much to do with the story-factor and the falling from grace; I notice there is a mantra out there where people think of that as part of the original-thinking outside-the-box stuff Welles was doing. I think CK is getting a first-place ribbon here just for showing up, which doesn’t fit at all since there’s nothing unique or original about the fall-from-grace. It’s in Milton, it’s in Greek Mythology, it’s timeless, really.

To me, the story of the good man who falls from grace is most effective when it really makes you stop and think. When you say to yourself, “Wow, the movie is right, and yet if I were faced with the decision I would have done the same thing.” That’s when it really packs a punch. Frankly, I don’t see anything like that in CK, I don’t even see the attempt. All I see is…dirty-rat-bastard he used to be one of “us,” and before he got his first gray hairs he started siding with all his rich friends. Well, if you hate rich people I suppose it keeps the effect anyway. And so, within the establishment critics of 1951, and 1941 as well, that seems to me to be where all the adoration is locked up — the third “enemy of my enemy is my friend” aspect of it. For the other two reasons, I can certainly see declaring the film to be good…it’s certainly well above-average. And I like it when people think outside the box, and the photography is beautiful and haunting.

“Step one: Figure out if you already think A. If not, fuck you and I’m outta here. ”

I’ve been mentoring a woman who is attempting to gain her college degree at a point “later in life.” It’s brought me a few smiles, and I’ve had to wince, occasionally. Last month one of the issues that came up was on the topic of “is a corporation a ‘person’ or not?” And, by extension, do corporations have the right to express views that advantage the corporation to the detriment of another company or individual? Especially when that individual is a politician?

Today’s lesson was statistics. Given a data set, how and what can and should be reported? I looked at the data set. It was a pretty crappy data set, and reviewed her reporting on the data set. Given that the data was horrid, what if anything can be salvaged for a Final?

She finally admitted that what she hoped would be shown by the data, couldn’t. But, there was significant data there, and with the correct mining, could make an interesting presentation of that data, which can show that certain characteristics of the data could express a likelyhood of greater or lesser importance of individual characteristics to the interviewee.

Part of the paper,though, was to utilize different graphing methods to depict the data.

But her biggest problem was, confounding error. What the survey attempted to demonstrate was so screwed up by incomplete answers–or simply answered wrongly–that there were simply no conclusions that could be demonstrated. It was f*cked from the word go.

The whole CK thing, to me, is like that. If you’re told it was great, there’s your data. If, after review of technique you can find innovation, well, there’s that. But when was innovation alone enough to make a great movie great? How about this; given a choice to watch Lawrence of Arabia or Citizen Kane, which would you watch? In a room full of friends? With your thirteen year-old son?

Can you imagine sitting with a bowl of popcorn, a thirteen year-old and CK? (Really?)
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If there’s a gauge of greatness for movies, it has to be the collision point between the maker’s intent and the emotional reaction of the audience. So I don’t think the greatness of CK can ever be separated from the political leanings of the people who take delight in seeing a derogation of W. Hearst…or at least, it can’t be separated from their anger.

There was a miniseries in 1986 about Czar Peter The Great, staring Maximillian Schell, based on the book by R. K. Massie. Lots of give-a-damn packed into that one; wonderful stuff, especially among the made-for-teevee offerings. It was told as a tragedy about a man born into the Romanov dynasty, made Emperor over the world’s largest country by accident, determined to “drag all of you, kicking and screaming if I have to, into the modern world!” Great ambitions, fell from grace, ended up executing his own son.

I’d put CK on par with that. PTG had a more eventful and interesting story, CK has better photography, so it all evens out. This is not an insult. More of…a check on reality, and perspective.